‘It may seem impossible for anything original to appear about the Falklands War of 1982, so much has been written about it, but Hugh Bicheno’s book is that thing. His depiction of the origins and direction of the war is exhilaratingly politically incorrect . . . and whether they agree or not, readers will find this book gripping and discomfiting.’
John Keegan, Daily Telegraph
‘Readers will by now perceive that Bicheno is not a mincer of words. He spares nobody. . . But he knows his stuff about how soldiers fight battles, and he has done us all a service by explaining them so well for a new generation.’
Max Hastings, Daily Mail
The working title was ‘Guilt, Complicity and Shame’, which ended up being early chapter titles. I was an intelligence officer posted at the Buenos Aires embassy during the 1970s and knew very well that the war came about because of the cowardly bad faith of the policy pursued by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) under successive British governments, from Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher inclusive. Anticipating that the announced ‘Official History’ would continue the process of whitewashing begun by the shameless Franks Report of 1983, I decided to tell it like it was. Although the old lie about an ‘intelligence failure’ still circulates, it has been a source of pride to me to note that since Razor’s Edge was published the politicians who for twenty-five years sheltered behind the falsehood began to admit that they were better informed than they thought it convenient to mention when events were still fresh in the public mind.
It was also an outstanding epic of arms and I was surprised to discover that nobody had thought to marry the many published accounts by British and Argentine participants. In Buenos Aires I had shared an office with an FCO colleague, Howard Pearce, probably the most honest man I have ever known. Fortuitously his last posting was as Governor of the Falkland Islands, which gave me another good reason to visit the islands. The happy occasion of his marriage later in 2003 led to a return visit, and as a result I was able to explore the battlefields in great detail and to assemble the mosaic of participants’ recollections on the framework of the eloquent terrain. |
